lmfao true

Only we can stop the horrors we have wrought.

For a fee, of course...

Wait are you implying you think LLMs could be conscious? Fuckin hell we're cooked.

Just because we don’t know what it is doesn’t mean we can’t know what it isn’t.

Nobody can even agree on a concrete definition of consciousness

Not only is that false, it doesn't make logical sense...

Lots of people agree on a different definitions of consciousness.

And most of the ones educated on the topic all agree on the same thing.

A bunch of people who never bothered to try and learn about something not understanding it, doesn't mean anything.

I downvoted this when you first posted it but I came back to find it has 50-something upvotes, so I feel compelled to respond.

It’s obvious that you haven’t read the article since literally the second fucking sentence defines exactly what the author means by “consciousness”: “the capacity for subjective experience.”

So, your comment is completely useless. And it’s mostly wrong.

Woah woah woah my friend. I'm here for most of your conversation, but to talk shit about your CAT!? I draw the line. They may not exibit the type of intelligence we have, but cats are smart AF! Who cleans you cats shit and piss up!? Hmmmmmm? Who feeds them daily with only minor vocalizing!? That cat basically made you their slave and didn't even have to threaten you!

GENIUS!!!

Also, those 100 trillion neurons do a fuck tonne more than just putting words together.

LLM's at the core are just distance measurement databases between words. Dont tell me AI is conscious, it's a fucking database

So humans are the only consciouse beings. And nothing with fewer connections could ever he conscious

I thought the chain-of-thought essentially qualifies; it responds to its own text for awhile before responding to you?

(LLMs aren't markovian; they need the whole history, or at least their whole context. Said context is quite large, certainly more than most people can usefully remember. Part of what makes them so good at literature search.)

The funniest exercise is to ask any LLM for a short story and they all come up with Elias the lighthouse keeper visited by Maria or some variation on that theme. That's not creative or conscious.

Not only that, they only act when directed. There's zero idle "thought" when they're not actively performing a task.

This is strictly false, generalization in LLMs is well documented.

It's also not relevant. Read the first point in the article: intelligence != consciousness. Individual ants, bats, and fish do not do anything very creative (certainly less creative than gpt-2), yet they are probably all conscious.

That's not the reason, we're in the same boat when it comes to knowledge in many ways.

But we don't even know what consciousness is so it's a waste of time reading the "3 reasons (*potential)" IMO.

Also an LLM only produces output when it is prompted to do so. Between prompts it's not sitting there - waiting, wondering about the meaning of life, getting bored - until you prompt it again. It's basically dead.

I like to compare llms to a Galton Board. Instead of the regular layout of pins someone added or removed pins so the marbles on the bottom fall into nice to look patterns.

Case in point have they ever turned on a model and left it for it to, on its own, decide "wait what's going on, who am I, what/where am I?". And start independently exploring?

Highly doubt it. If so, we're cooked

By identifying"memories" they can include the information in the context of the next update - this is akin to our short term memory. Make it self pruning, where the data is saved locally but not included in the next context, and it acts the same as own memory system.

And point 3, as far as I can tell from this argument, isn't serious. It merely asserts that there are some models of consciousness that would prevent us from using the term for AI. But the models aren't 'popular', 'widespread', or justified at all afaict. It's just that the author has a pet causal mechanism they made up. It's also pretty abelist by my read.

integrated information theory (IIT), starts from the essential properties of consciousness — those that are true of every experience we can have. For instance, we experience every visual scene as a single, integrated whole: its left and right side, colours and shapes are bound together to make the experience what it is.

In other words, if you've got any sort of trouble integrating a visual scene, then you aren't conscious. Sure.

These are, to be frank, really weak. They say on point 2:

Computational functionalism ... is popular among some scientists and philosophers, too, but we think it is fatally flawed because brains are not — or at least not just — computers that are made of meat.

One main reason is that it is impossible to separate what biological brains do — their functional organization — from what they are — their material substrate. In other words, there is no distinct separation between the mind and living tissue in the human brain, as there is between software and hardware in a digital computer.

Restating clearly: Ghosts are real. The mitochondria is not only the powerhouse of the cell, it also gives you mystic powers.

Really? The source they site for this point features the lovely assumption "consciousness is unique to biological life". From this axiom, I see how the conclusion follows, but I don't see why we should believe this axiom. We can do physics emulation of every atom in a fruit fly on a computer...

Thanks, could only see half of it because of paywall.

In other words:

• Statement that does not prove anything is or isn't conscious
• Unsupported assertion
• Unsupported assertion

Wow, very convincing article! I wish I'd thought of that! /s

Those sound like arbitrary assertions to me, which no backing apart from the authors personal beliefs

Point 1 is surely true, but also not helpful. The most persuasive example inside is the classic:

Similar to an LLM, AlphaFold is a powerful neural network running on silicon hardware. Yet almost nobody worries that it might be conscious. That’s because AlphaFold predicts protein structures, whereas LLMs ‘talk’ to us.

You can read this both ways...

That’s every binary though.